As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results. —Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846”

MY IDEAL MOVIE OF THE ’80s art world wouldn’t be Basquiat, it would be Jeff Koons. To make a film about that period from the vantage point of Neo-Expressionism means making a certain kind of movie, one that for all its wit and local color essentially confirms the general public’s perceptions about artists and their lives. To be poor and beautiful, living in a cardboard box; to be possessed by “primitivist” poetic afflatus; to become rich and dissolute and careless; to die prematurely, and in sordid circumstances: we’ve heard it all before, it doesn’t matter that certain details may correspond to the historical record. For me, the real